Category Page SEO Best Practices

July 4, 2026

Category Page SEO, best practices for optimising your e-commerce website

E-commerce businesses from around the world are always looking to perfect their SEO strategies. One way to achieve higher ranking on

Google for a range of keywords is to better optimise the e-commerce category pages.

In this article we will recommend various ways that your business can achieve that, whether it be via mobile optimisation or through various user experience improvements.

Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 04/07/2026

What is Category Page SEO?

On many category pages that our team sees, there are often many missed opportunities. For example, on many e-commerce websites, the top section and the schema elements are left empty.

Even worse, sometimes generic copy, keyword stuffed paragraphs or AI content is used!

This is a massive missed opportunity, as the category pages can be so much more.

They can be for example:

Actual landing pages
Help to persuade shoppers into becoming customers
Act as an informative guide
Help to demonstrate to Google that you are experts in that particular product. This therefore can improve the Google EEAT score massively.

Bounce rates

A sustained and elevated bounce rate represents a lost opportunity.

Although you as a business might be experts at what you do and offer, often your customers will not be.

Therefore, visitors to a website often have 101 questions before purchasing. This is often why an e-commerce stores bounce rate is so high.

Often the page is just “content thin” which means it doesn’t answer the visitor’s question. This results in an increased level of shoppers leaving without visiting another page. This means an increased bounce rate is incurred.

Organic traffic and writing helpful content marketing
Every page on your e-commerce store needs to be as well optimised as possible. If its not then is a missed opportunity. Your category pages offer the opportunity for you to write helpful advice, which will improve your Google EEAT score.

Keywords that match intent

Sometimes, a shopper will know broadly what they want, but not the exact product they want.
They may know they need an energy efficient dishwasher, but will not the brand they want.
Therefore, the category page allows you to optimise for longer tail keywords, as well as huge range of product keywords. Now lets say that you offer advice in relation to energy efficiency and guarantee periods. Let’s say you make clear that Samsung Dishwashers come with an impressive guarantee period in the product schema or an FAQ, well this could be enough to attract thousands more organic visitors.

Don’t dismiss long tail keywords

You don’t want to add too much text to your category pages, as this can overwhelm the shopper.

However, you do want to optimise the page for long tail keywords. Therefore make sure that page is optimised for high intent keywords.

However, also optimise for longer tail keywords as well.

Write helpful advice that shoppers actually want to read.

Too much text can overwhelm the visitor, leading to an increased bounce rate.
However if you make clear the USP that’s the unique selling points, plus you combine that with offering helpful advice, then the dwell times will increase.
Because your writing helpful advice, the bounce rate should decrease.

Therefore, we run a very successful e-commerce SEO business.

Because we have 14 years of experience, we have huge e-commerce search engine optimisation experience.

Let’s us offer some of that wisdom to you, by recommending to adding the following

FAQ

Integrated into the websites design, you should add a FAQ. A common style is use an accordion FAQ section. This will allow you to answer commonly asked questions regarding that product or service. This increases the relevancy of the page. Plus, it can also improve the Google

EEAT score, as well as informing Googlebot exactly what that page is about.

SEO friendly text

Don’t just write to hit a word count.

Don’t write content marketing that’s content thin

Make sure the work is well researched. The text needs to be SEO friendly text, which means white hat and well written. Don’t use AI and also don’t duplicate the work.

Text below the product grid

In the product grid you might have lets say 25 products. The leading e-commerce retailers, what they often do is add some high quality text below the product grid. This again helps Googlebot to understand the page, the products being sold. This clarity of which products are shown on the page, enables Google to better understand what your selling, therefore serve the products for the right queries.

Schema

Do add schema mark-up. What schema mark-up will allow is, for the products to appear as rich snippets within Google’s organic ranks.

Well written meta titles and descriptions

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of a well written meta title and meta description.

These can massively increase the CTR when implemented correctly.

Also, if you were to ask our SEO company, we would say don’t use automated tools to do this work. Instead use your copywriters, or your on-page SEO experts to write the meta titles and the meta descriptions.

Internal links to send link equity to different pages

Your link building team and agency may have built some really powerful backlinks to key pages.

We would recommend using internal links to divert some of that link equity to the right pages.

This can include the category pages, where you can link equity to improve the organic ranking of that page.

H1 should include the primary keyword

On an e-commerce website, or on a category page, there can sometimes be in excess of 500 words of text applied to that page.

Therefore, the H1 is the most important on-page SEO element.

In this section make sure that you add your primary keyword.

Optimise the meta title

The meta title should be short and snappy.

Write it so that is crystal clear what the page is selling. Then we would also recommend adding the main keyword first within the meta description. This is another way to clearly signal to Googlebot what the page is selling.

The meta description as well should give a good and compelling reason for the shopper to click through. For example, “we offer free next delivery on order over £75”. For example.

H1 (Header 1)

Its worth recapping over the importance of the H1 or header tag. The reason being this element clearly signals to shoppers and the search engines what that page is all about. The primary keyword, reinforces what the page is selling.

In SEO we call this improving the “relevancy” of the page.

What is the meta title?

Meta Title

The meta title simply is the clickable headline in the SERP’s, that’s the Google search results. Writing these to improve the CTR can help to improve SEO relevance and send a message to the shopper exactly what products are being sold on that page.

Meta description

The meta description allows you to sell to the shopper what that page is selling. You don’t have much space to do this, so use the word count wisely. However, by writing a well written meta title and meta description, you can greatly improve the CTR. Think about incorporating brand names, also write a USP that you offer, that perhaps your competitors do not.

For example, the:

H1: Hugo Boss Suits
Meta title:
Hugo Boss suits for next day delivery | Free returns and free delivery over £250.00

Utilise internal links

Internal links help Googlebot to crawl and index your e-commerce website.

They also help Googlebot to understand your site’s structure.

Therefore, if for example, a certain page is linked to a lot, via internal links, this signifies that the page is an important page on your e-commerce website.

Internal links, help you to spread link equity across pages.

Include breadcrumb navigation

Breadcrumb navigation should be used on your e-commerce website.

It allows shoppers to know the pages that they have visited to get to their current page.

This allows them for example, to move backwards if they so wish. For example, they might have selected Bosch Dishwashers, yet wanted to use the breadcrumb navigation to move back to the dishwasher main page. The breadcrumb navigation allows you to add structured internal links, it also offers the shopper a better user experience, by offering better website navigation.

Add schema mark-up

Now for this, you often will need the help and assistance of your web design agency.

However, by adding schema mark-up to product pages and product category pages, what you can do is increase the chances of generating a rich snippet.

Now a rich snippet will stand out in the SERP’s.

That is a rich snippet will appear much more prominently in the search engine results pages.

This therefore means a much better CTR, or click through rate.

For example, when somebody is looking for lets say a tent, that offers for example a certain feature that they are looking for. The product could appear as a rich snippet.

What are the 7 top e-commerce mistakes that your agency sees on frequent basis?

1) Content thin pages

One of the most common e-commerce SEO mistakes that our team sees, is content thin pages.

Google needs well written text, to decipher where to rank that page.

If the page is full of helpful and well written text, that has a really good Google EEAT score, the page will rank higher.

However, if the page offers no context, in terms of what its selling, then it might not even make it into Google’s index.

The content needs to be well written, relevant and offer value to the shopper. Therefore, do consider adding FAQ content, guides, well written content marketing. You may wish to add this below the product grid. You may also want to write a top paragraph to better explain the products for sale on that page.

This will allow Googlebot to better understand the page, and what your selling.

In terms of optimising a category page or a product page, also keep the following in mind:

– Google EEAT
– The text should be unique
– Don’t duplicate
– Don’t use AI text
– Make sure that the information is helpful
– Make sure its kept up to date
– Make sure that Googlebot can actually crawl and index the page
– Make sure that you’re writing the text to help shoppers, don’t just write for SEO gains as this will not work
– Monitor bounce rates, if too high, make page amendments until you can improve this

Avoid duplicate content

Make sure that you correctly use canonical tags, because you don’t want duplication issues on your e-commerce website.

Duplicated content marketing, or near identical pages will damage your organic search engine optimisation.

The reason is simple, it causes “cannibalisation issues” on the page.

For example, it can mean that Google’s algorithms get confused as to which page to rank.

If both pages say the same thing, and are both selling lets say a certain brand of luxury bracelets, then Google will not know which page to rank higher.

What often happens is that a competitor will have a website where it makes it clear which page is the main page selling that bracelet.

Because the competitors page has better on-page SEO, it will rank higher.
While another website has internal pages competing with each other, meaning they rank much lower in Google’s SERP’s.

Incorrectly configured Robot.txt

Sometimes the robot.txt settings will be set up incorrectly.

This can block Googlebot from indexing the key pages.

Therefore, on a routine basis, make sure that the robots.txt is set up correctly.

Make sure that the product pages and the category pages, and all pages that you want indexed can be crawled and indexed by Googlebot.

Use site audits

You can use tools such as Screaming From to crawl your website.

What some of these tools can do is highlight important technical SEO glitches.

You can then fix these glitches, which can help improve your organic SEO.

Lack of trust signals

Sometimes, you can have a lot of organic traffic.

Perhaps sometimes hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.

However, if the web design, and also the on-page SEO is not set up to convert the customer, this can result in lack of sales.

For example, a common mistake would be, not to integrate a customer review website.

For example, you might have a really good Trustpilot score.

For example, you might have a score of 4.7 stars in terms of customer satisfaction.

Therefore, you could integrate this into say the footer, or the main category pages, which can help generate more sales. SEO companies refer to this as trust signals.

If you have more trust signals, then shoppers are more likely to trust your business.

Would you like our team to work on your e-commerce website?

We know that this article is a lot to take in, for example, we have discussed schema markup, category pages and how to better optimise them through using on-page SEO.

Now a lot of businesses will be looking to hire one of the best e-commerce SEO agencies.

And that’s exactly what Walsh & Partners are, we are one of the best e-commerce agencies around.